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For These Chefs, Even Fire Can Be Improved

Peter De Clercq of the restaurant Elckerlijc in Belgium says he tries to “differentiate each dish by spicing not just the meat, but the fire.”Credit
Jock Fistick for The New York Times

THE first thing you see on entering Elckerlijc, Peter De Clercq’s restaurant in Maldegem, Belgium, is a massive grill spewing sparks like a blast furnace in the open kitchen. But what you smell is more than just smoldering oak, apple or cherry wood.

Mr. De Clercq tosses handfuls of what he calls fire spice — a blend of coriander seed, juniper berries, peppercorns, rosemary and other herbs — onto the embers to generate fragrant blasts of spice smoke. He’ll also throw in olive pits from Portugal (excellent for grilling veal, he says) and chips from barrels of kriek, Belgian cherry beer, well suited to poultry and pork.

“In a sense, grilling is a monolithic cooking method, producing a similar taste in everything you cook over the fire,” Mr. De Clercq said. “We look to differentiate each dish by spicing not just the meat, but the fire.”

Victor Arguinzoniz, the chef-owner of Etxebarri in the hilly Basque countryside between San Sebastián and Bilbao, Spain, prefers to tame, not flavor, the fire. He cooks the most delicate foods imaginable on calibrated grills over small mounds of embers measured almost to the coal.

The grill’s very unpredictability is what appeals to the chef Pascal Bardet at Alain Ducasse’sLouis XV, at the Hotel de Paris in Monaco. And at the experimental restaurants Moto and iNG in Chicago, the grill ranks up there with the liquid nitrogen immersion tank as a tool for innovation.

As burgers and steaks are being flipped on backyard grills all across the United States this weekend, some of the world’s top chefs are finding sophisticated new ways of handling this ancient, elemental cooking method. They are among a new generation of grill masters whose revolutionary techniques are redefining the very notion of grilling.

Mr. De Clercq found his passion for live-fire cooking early. At 14 he grilled sausages at street fairs in the Belgian seaside town of Knokke-Heist. Since then, he has written Belgium’s first barbecue book and won the World Barbecue Championship in 2003, and now he hosts grilling shows on Belgian television.

Founded as a simple chop house in 1990, Elckerlijc has evolved into a stylish 100-seat restaurant that draws patrons from all over Europe. Now, as then, the wood ember-fueled grill remains the restaurant’s focal point.

“Charcoal has the taste burned out of it,” Mr. De Clercq, 41, said. “You can’t beat the flavor of wood.”

Belgium does not have a grilling tradition. So Mr. De Clercq set out to create one. He grills haricots verts wrapped in smoky local Breydel bacon. He simmers kriek beer to make a cherry-flavored teriyaki glaze. Belgium’s beloved mussels come grilled with herbs and wine in a “Q bag” — a sort of foil papillote that Mr. De Clercq designed for steam-grilling. For dessert he grills Belgian nougat on long, slender skewers — the Flemish version of a s’more.

Nobody needs to invent a grilling tradition in Spain, where the asador, or grill master, has long been a fixture in kitchens.

“I grew up in a home without gas or electricity,” Mr. Arguinzoniz, 51, said. “My grandmother did all her cooking on a wood-burning hearth.”

It was those childhood memories that he longed to capture when he opened Etxebarri in Axpe (population 100) in 1990. In 2009, he received a Michelin star.

In Etxebarri’s kitchen, local encina (holm oak) is burned down to blazing embers in wood-burning ovens and used for fueling the grills and smoke-roasting. The restaurant goes through about four tons of wood each month. Mr. Arguinzoniz winces at the notion of propane or charcoal. “The only fuel worth cooking over is wood,” he said.

When he opened his restaurant, Mr. Arguinzoniz wanted dishes more ambitious than the chuletones — rib steaks — served at traditional Basque grill parlors. For what he had in mind, though, the tools didn’t yet exist.

So the chef, a former paper mill manager, designed six sleek stainless steel grills with geared cranks to raise and lower the grates to the precise millimeter.

To grill angulas, Spain’s prized baby eels, he cut the bottoms out of frying pans and lined them with heat-resistant wire screening. To grill mussels, he fitted a large pot with a sort of inverted funnel in the bottom to catch the wood smoke.

To grill caviar, Mr. Arguinzoniz lined what looks like a metal steamer with seaweed, placed the caviar on top, then positioned the device high above apple-wood embers. “The gentle heat and wood smoke give caviar flavor nuances you’d never dream of if you’ve experienced it only cold,” he said.

Mr. Arguinzoniz prefers small fires to the Mephistophelian expanses of embers favored by some cooks. For foods requiring the high heat of direct grilling — like supernaturally sweet hard-shell clams — Mr. Arguinzoniz doses each grill with precisely the number of embers he wants. He restokes the fires for every dish.

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Unlike Mr. De Clercq, he uses no rubs, spice pastes, marinades or barbecue sauces. The only seasonings that could be seen in Mr. Arguinzoniz’s kitchen were fleur de sel and sea salt. For basting, he spritzes the food on the grill with nothing more than olive or vegetable oil from a spray bottle. Sauces are made on the spot from juices that accumulate on the serving platter, emulsified with hot olive oil stirred in with the bottom of a wire strainer. The result is understated but intensely flavorful.

Thanks to some of his more offbeat creations (ember-grilled sea cucumber, for example, grilled octopus so tiny they’re handled with tweezers or a soup made with grilled pea pods), Mr. Arguinzoniz has been described as the Ferran Adrià of the grill. But he’s a pure classicist when it comes to flavor. “I don’t like a lot of spices or condiments,” he said. “My goal is to preserve and concentrate the flavor of each food.”

It’s a sentiment that resonates with Mr. Bardet, the 35-year-old executive chef at Le Louis XV.

“Despite our status as a Michelin three-star, our cuisine is very traditional — it’s rustic, almost peasant,” he said. “It connotes summer, the outdoors, the pleasure of sharing with friends.

“Here at Alain Ducasse, we’re all about flavor,” Mr. Bardet continued. “Grilling gives you a taste you simply can’t get anywhere else.”

In the Louis XV kitchen, the grilling is done on a pair of vintage Labesse Giraudon Molteni grills installed more than a half-century ago. For fuel, Mr. Bardet prefers natural lump charcoal made from beech. “Wood heats unevenly, and it takes a long time to burn it down to embers,” he said. “With charcoal you get a good, even cooking surface all at once.”

So what’s on the grill these days at Le Louis XV? “Right now we’re grilling wild salmon from the Adour, served with a sherry vinegar reduction, and baby lamb from the Pyrenees marinated with summer savory and espelette pepper,” Mr. Bardet said. He also prizes the high, dry heat of the grill for vegetables — like radicchio, which the chef seasons with olive paste and anchovies.

For Mr. Bardet, grilling represents the opposite of what’s happening in French cuisine today.

“With molecular cuisine and sous vide, everything is calibrated to the nanosecond,” he said. “What we love about grilling is that it’s so primitive, unpredictable, wild, even dangerous.”

For Homaro Cantu, one of the most playful, forward-thinking chefs in the United States, grilling is perfectly compatible with modernist cooking.

“You’ll always find barbecue on my menu,” said Mr. Cantu, 35, the chef of the restaurants Moto and the recently opened iNG in Chicago.

Tucked away in iNG’s basement kitchen, amid the essential oil extractor and thermo scalable oven, is a custom-built, 12-gauge naval steel wood-burning grill that would make any Texan feel right at home.

Recent offerings at iNG include popcorn puffed on a wood-burning grill and seasoned with cider vinegar; grilled salmon served under a bell jar filled with wood smoke; and tender, smoky baby back ribs skewered on slender pipettes of a warm brothy essence of barbecue sauce. (“Take a bite of meat, then squirt the sauce in your mouth,” a waiter suggested.)

Mr. Cantu uses the smoker at Moto and the wood-burning grill at iNG in very different ways from a typical grill master. “For starters, we don’t grill anything from start to finish.” Instead, Mr. Cantu and crew might use the hot grill to crisp the exterior of pan-fried quail or add a layer of smoke flavor to a lamb T-bone.

For the “Japanese barbecue” at iNG, Thomas Bowman, 28, the executive chef, braises monster beef short ribs, each weighing a pound, for 3 1/2 hours in a mixture of soy sauce, rice vinegar, brown sugar, garlic and lemon grass. Just before being served, the ribs are grilled over blazing cherry wood, imparting a crisp, charred crust and an inviting whiff of wood smoke.

He and Mr. Cantu also burn wood for low-temperature smoking. “We’ll cure a pork belly with fish sauce, cane sugar, cilantro and other Vietnamese seasonings,” Mr. Cantu said. “Then we’ll smoke it at 188 degrees for 12 hours. It comes out completely soft and without texture.” (In iNG world, this is a good thing, allowing the chef to impose the texture he desires at the end.)

The most singular dish at iNG may well be an oxymoronic twist on what most grill masters use as fuel: “edible charcoal.”

“To make it, we whittle a spongy white bread into chunks shaped like lump charcoal,” Mr. Cantu explained. “We dye it with squid ink and flavor it with Asian seasonings, then we pan-fry it crisp in vegetable oil.” Like all good charcoal, iNG’s comes with a light dusting of white ash — achieved by plunging the black charcoal lumps in liquid nitrogen.

“A barbecue should be memorable,” Mr. Cantu said. “Eating charcoal is an experience you’ll never forget.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2011, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Please Read Before Burning: For These Chefs, Even Fire Can Be Improved. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe